30 Seconds of Design header 2024

DESIGN OF BOARD GAMES

It’s Saturday night. Your family just sat down to enjoy a nice night of camaraderie and competition. Out comes a beat up card board box and the night begins!

Board games, card games, and more recently video games have been a long standing tradition in household entertainment for decades. They bring us into a world of playfulness with simple rules and colorful characters. Like many other forms of graphic design, the artistry of a board game is imperative to its success. Not only does it need to be colorful and build a 2D universe in (think: Candyland, LIFE, Clue), but also needs to offer easy to read, intuitive direction to help you play a game you almost certainly didn’t read all the rules for (think: Monopoly, Sorry, Trouble).  Most board games also come with additional, integral items. Playing cards, figurines, dice, and coins for example all need to be designed for maximum fun while playing. 

While we think of the shiny, plastic, well-organized game pieces of the modern years when it comes to games, they’ve actually been around for centuries. Historians know that dice (or something similar) have been found in excavation sites in Iran from over 3,000 years ago. The Song Dynasty (found in China over 1,000 years ago) created the Domino, leading to the creation of the most popular tile game in the world, Mahjong. The Egyptians even created Senet nearly 3500 years ago, an ancient version of Mancala or Monopoly. 

As civilization progressed, so did the intricacy of our games and gaming pieces. The first commercial board game (The Mansion of Happiness) was produced in the year 1800 in England, decades before the gaming pioneer Milton Bradley was born and began his empire. Throughout this evolution humans continuously found new ways to make their games more aesthetically attractive. 

A great example is looking at the world’s oldest chess set, unearthed around Jordan dating back to 1,300 years ago. The pieces, barely distinguishable from each other barely mirror the intricately detailed, colored, personalitied pieces of the knights, rooks, and bishops we know today. Just go on Etsy and see how many thousands of specialized chess sets you can buy for yourself.

So whether it’s a simply deck of cards for a game of War or a full D&D set up with your friends, the small joy of setting up a game night has brought us together for centuries.
GAME HISTORY
THE ART OF BOARD GAMES
CHESS ARTIFACT

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